“”Marxism says, "Eliminate class distinctions" and Stalinism does so by the simple and effective process of destructions, as Tamerlane destroyed his enemies or the Hebrew prophet [Samuel] slew for the glory of Jehovah.

Their motivation stems from standard "my enemy's enemy" logic, combined with the idea that The Revolution required and requires a strong leader, and Stalin fits that bill. Therefore, his flaws must be papered over, for the good of all.

Stalin apologists call people who disagree with them "revisionist" — particularly their mortal enemies, the Trots — while calling themselves "anti-revisionist", much like how TERFs call themselves "gender critical" or white supremacists call themselves "race realists". If talking about non-communists, they will use the curious phrase "right-wing liberal".[2]

In Russia, a worryingly large percentage of the modern-day population think highly of Stalin (although a rather lesser proportion would want to live in a country actually ruled by Stalin).[3] He is also quite popular in his native Georgia, which is hardly surprising given the Georgians' tendency toward national pride as well as traditional respect for "alpha male" strongmen.
This is best understood as a form of nationalism distinct from Western communist apologism.

Loss of central control — it was Stalin's subordinates, not him! (rehashing the "Good Tsar with evil advisors" — and "If only the Tsar knew about this" — tropes of Romanov Russia)

NKVD acting alone — basically, this comes down to blaming the entire Great Purge on Yezhov, though this causes problems trying to explain the atrocities carried out by Lavrentiy Beria (though, given the horror stories about his personal life that came to light in 2003, he probably didn't need Stalin to encourage him), Genrikh Yagoda, and to an extent, Felix Dzerzhinsky (though he was active under Lenin).

Farm collectivization totally works, but Lysenkoism is rubbish, so it failed.

It is important to keep in mind that before World War II and the Cold War, believing everything Stalin said about himself and the Soviet Union was completely standard in Western progressive circles. It became less so as the Cold War progressed and more details of what he was actually doing came out, and completely untenable with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the release of extensive source documents.

Stalin apologists play down or outright deny the Holodomor, the starvation of large chunks of Ukraine.

The Holodomor may or may not technically qualify as an attempted genocide (though the UN, EU, Canada, and Ukraine all regard it as one). So Stalin apologists will ride that lack of unanimity for all it's worth. Note, however, that the equation goes:

The debating tactics closely resemble those of Holocaust deniers, because it's very closely analogous: denial of an extensively documented attempted genocide. You'll see attempts to minimise the numbers, with the implication that the number might be zero, or to assert that it was unintentional or entirely natural (e.g. plant rust diseases that those mere peasants were too stupid to spot, being, er, farmers). Or, "best" of all, that the Kulaks deserved it.

Robert Conquest — author of The Great Terror, which sets out in detail the case for Stalin as murderous tyrant (for the second edition, which benefited from Perestroika-era document releases, his friend Kingsley Amis suggested the title I Told You So, You Fucking Fools[5]) — doesn't refer to the Holodomor by the term "genocide". So this will be literally the one topic on which a tankie will decide, well, maybe Robert Conquest wasn't so bad after all.

Holodomor denial takes many forms. The most offensive is arguably outright denial of its existence by those like Maoist Rebel News. That is quickly debunked by some maths.[6]

Mark B. Tauger (an apologist, though an actual historian) is a popular source among apologists. He claims that the famine was an accident and unavoidable, but his data is of dubious origin and selection criteria,[7] and Tauger does not offer an argument why his "data" is representative of all collective farms in Ukraine, not just the farms from which he got his data.

The kulaks were originally the richest independent farmers, risen from the peasantry. Lenin had condemned them as class enemies, "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine."[8]

Stalin, wishing to collectivise, expanded the official definition of "kulak" to any peasant owning land or livestock; any peasant selling surplus goods on the market could be labeled a kulak. In practice, any peasant who did not provide grain to quota particularly the artificially high quotas of 1929-1933, was labeled a kulak. Not appearing to be starving was taken as evidence of hoarding.

On 30 January 1930, the Politburo approved the extermination of kulaks as a class. Soviet archives published in 1990 show 1,803,392 people being sent to labour colonies and camps in 1930 and 1931, with 1,317,022 actually reaching the destinations. 389,521 "kulaks" and their relatives died in labour colonies from 1932 to 1940. Read Nazino affair for a sample.

A serious Stalin apologist will, at some point, come out with "the kulaks deserved it". When humans with any sense of proportion react with outrage and disgust, they will often then try to justify Stalin's actions, deny them, or both simultaneously.

The Stalin Society maintains that the gulags were only for offenders who had committed serious crimes (economic, rape, homicide, etc.)[9] — perfectly ordinary prisons for deserving criminals, not forced labor camps that dissenters were shipped off to arbitrarily. In reality, people could be sent to the gulags for even minor offenses.[10]

The current estimate of the gulags' death toll is 1,258,537 from 1934 to 1953, and roughly 1.6 million from 1929 to 1953.[11]

The Stalin Society claims only (only!) 100,000 people were executed during the Great Purge.[12] The actual number is 681,692,[13] but that's just Western bourgeois propaganda.

Stalin personally signed 357 execution warrants which authorized the execution of 40,000 individuals, 90% having been confirmed executed.[14] Historian Oleg V. Khlevniuk said in his book Master of the House: Stalin and His Inner Circle regarding the Great Purge: "… theories about the elemental, spontaneous nature of the terror, about a loss of central control over the course of mass repression, and about the role of regional leaders in initiating the terror are simply not supported by the historical record."[15]

Stalin hand-picked Nikolai Yezhov to accomplish what Yagoda could not. Yezhov carried out his new position with ruthless efficacy.[16]

The more sophisticated Stalin apologists will argue that while he may have done some nasty things, it's all right because he was an anti-fascist and the Soviet Union was vital in taking down Hitler. This will often be contrasted with the appeasement pursued by Western bourgeois powers.

But while Stalin clashed with Hitler during the Spanish Civil War, he didn't let this get in the way of doing a deal with the Nazis when it suited him. Having first ordered his subordinates to "purge the ministry of Jews,"[17] Stalin got down to business. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939. Less than three weeks later, Germany invaded Poland and the much-maligned Chamberlain promptly declared war on Hitler. Stalin waited a few more weeks before declaring war… on Poland. In celebration of their victory, the Wehrmacht and Red Army held two joint parades in Brest-Litovsk and Minsk, Belarus. As a further show of solidarity, Stalin handed over some German Communist exiles to Hitler, who promptly sent them to the concentration camps.

Stalin stuck to his agreement with Hitler, to the extent that he refused to mobilise the Red Army even when it was apparent to everyone else that Operation Barbarossa was in the making. French Communists, who would after Barbarossa become the backbone of the Resistance, were ordered at the time not to resist the Germans in the portion of France they occupied or the Vichy government elsewhere (temporarily) in France.[18][19] Similarly, other Communist parties in Nazi-occupied Europe had been ordered to work with the Nazis, but then had to go underground at the beginning of Barbarossa when all Communist parties were outlawed and their members risked being sent to the camps if caught by the Nazis.

The Stalin apologist line is typically either that Stalin knew that Hitler would eventually attack and bought the USSR some time (this is the 20/20 hindsight version and it glosses over the fact that Stalin refused to acknowledge that Hitler had actually broken the pact during the first hours after the actual invasion had begun and was furious at army officers who reported the massive onslaught). Another excuse stems from the Soviet propaganda of the time, which claimed that the pact had pre-empted a sinister capitalist/imperialistplot, which had tried to get the USSR and the Third Reich into a war with each other to weaken both to the benefit of especially Britain and France. (While it's undoubtedly true that the leaders of Britain and France would have been more than happy to watch the two totalitarian regimes slug it out, how this wishful thinking would actually have led to a Russo-German war in the absence of the pact is unclear.)

The best spin to put on the sordid affair that was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is to view it as Stalin's recognition that collective security and trying to build a common anti-Nazi front was unrealistic in the wake of appeasement, but at best the pact was a temporary measure, resting on several rather optimistic assumptions, e.g. that the Wehrmacht would not be able to defeat the Western Allies (a prospect made less likely by the removal of the risk of a two-front war involving the USSR), or that if the Third Reich did manage to pull this off, it wouldn't turn on the Soviets next. While the pact did buy Stalin time and a buffer zone in Poland, he squandered both by the disastrous war with Finland[20] and lack of preparations for a Nazi invasion. Even worse, as a consequence of the pact, the USSR would end up on its own, facing the vast majority of the Nazi war machine after it had been honed in the Polish, Scandinavian, Benelux and French campaigns by which time it was also backed by the resources of the Nazi-occupied countries.

In 1940, the Soviets murdered an estimated 22,000 Polish military officers they had captured after invading the eastern part of Poland at the start of the Second World War. The Katyn massacre — so called because it took place in the forest of the same name — was authorized by Stalin and five other members of the Politburo in an order to execute 27,500 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" created at the request of Beria.[21][22] The executions were carried out by the NKVD; Vasili Blohkin, the NKVD chief executioner, shot 7,000 of the prisoners himself. Documents coming to light since the dissolution of the USSR undeniably confirm Stalin's involvement with the Katyn Massacre.[23]

When the mass graves in Katyn were discovered, they were used by the Nazis to attempt to smear the USSR. The Soviets, in turn, appointed a commission that blamed the incident on the Nazis.[24]

Stalin apologists ignore questions on the topic, blame the NKVD for being out of control or blame the Nazis. Both these objections are absurd: Stalin knowingly signed the orders, which undermines the argument that the NKVD acted alone or that the Nazis were responsible for the Katyn massacre.

The Stalin Society attempts to cast doubt upon the authenticity of documents implicating Stalin in the massacre.[25] They offer unsourced "eyewitness" testimony of locals seeing German soldiers at the scene or being pressured by German soldiers to blame the shootings on the Soviets. They then claim:

Moreover, pathologists who examined the bodies in 1943 concluded that they could not have been dead longer than two years. Furthermore, documents were found on some of the bodies which had obviously been missed by the Germans when they doctored the evidence. These included a letter dated September 1940, a postcard dated 12 November 1940, a pawn ticket receipted 14 March 1941 and another receipted 25 March 1941. Receipts dated 6 April 1941, 5 May 1941, 15 May 1941 and an unmailed postcard in Polish dated 20 June 1941. Although all these dates pre-date Soviet withdrawal, they all postdate the time of the alleged murder of the prisoners by the Soviet authorities in the spring of 1940, the time given as the date of the supposed massacre by all those whom the Germans were able to bully into giving false testimony.

Some 1 to 1.5 million were killed, often deliberately, as a result of mass deportations of ethnic minorities under Stalin — of those deaths, the deportation of Crimean Tatars and the deportation of Chechens were recognized as genocides by Ukraine and the European Parliament respectively.[26] For example, in the deportations of Chechens, everyone was rounded up, and anyone resisting, or anyone physically unfit to withstand the deportation - the sick, the elderly, pregnant women - were unceremoniously shot on the spot. Their villages were burned to the ground, and in some cases there were atrocious mass murders, such as the burning of 700 people alive in Haibah on the orders of NKVD generals. As much as 60% of the "deported" Chechens perished, in part due to deliberate poisoning of food rations.[27]

Stalinists will defend this pointing to the Crimean Tatar's allegiance and Chechnya's alleged allegiance to Germany during World War II.

Stalin was fond of shifting around, or just killing, entire ethnic groups in the Soviet Union that he considered "reactionary" rather than "progressive". Operations included the Greek Operation (an organised mass persecution that Greeks considered a "pogrom"), the Korean Operation (in which ethnic Koreans were moved from the far east to Kazakhstan), the German operation (1937-38), and the Polish Operation.

The Polish Operation, implemented by NKVD Order No. 00485,[28] was probably the worst. It led to the execution of 111,901 Poles resident in the Soviet Union. The original text of the order appears to target Polish spies but was interpreted by the NKVD as "absolutely all Poles" — a straight-up ethnic cleansing. Timothy Snyder estimates (conservatively) that 85,000 of the executed individuals were ethnically Polish,[29] and the rest were suspected Poles.

Stalin himself even said, "keep on digging and clean out this Polish filth." [30]

Apologists don't mention the Polish Operation and tend to claim not to have heard of it, with the default excuse being how totally out-of-control the NKVD was, and a second one of claiming that the idea Stalin was targeting Poles is ludicrous.

Some apologists argue that the total number of Stalin's victims is unknown (which is true as the documentation is lacking for some areas) or that the total estimated number is shrinking (which it has been). They use this to attempt to discredit the scholarly research placing the death toll around 20 million, not including deaths from WW2, trying to imply that a decreasing or foggy estimate might reasonably end at a trivial number. (100,000 is apparently a trivial number, as noted above.)

The total may be greater then this due to missed events and lack or recording or lower due to overlapping systems of repression and some of the higher estimates being from understudied events. This estimate roughly falls within Snyder's range of 6 to 9 million deaths[53][54] for the minimum and Conquest's claim that the deaths can "hardly be lower than some fifteen million"[55] - noting he recanted his 20 million figuring suggesting he believes in an estimate between 15 and 20 million though equal to neither.

It should be noted that some of the less reality-based anti-Communists, usually those who are bringing up a list of Stalin's crimes in some attempt to absolve Adolf Hitler of his, will include deaths in WWII in their estimate of people who were killed by Stalin. This distortion ranges from including Nazi troops killed by Stalin's forces, all the way up to attributing every death of any side to Stalin, with some more explicit neo-Nazis even going so far as to include all the victims of the Holocaust in that count. Criticism of this pseudohistorical practice is reasonable and, in and of itself, is not the same as Stalin apologism. However, this isn't to say that Stalin apologists don't have a habit of trashing distorted death counts from niche fascists with no platform as a form of bad faith questioning of the validity of the accurate death counts.)

Some apologists will defend the atrocities by arguing that the gulags, purges, and so forth were all necessary for industrialization: that mass collectivization and escalation of the class conflict with the Kulaks (which ironically was supported by Trotsky and the Left Opposition) was necessary to defeat Hitler and industrialize the USSR.

Robert Service argues that continuation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) would have brought about the same level of production in its mines and factories as was brought about by collectivization and rapid industrialization. [56] Other historians have concurred that, had the NEP been maintained, higher living standards and the ability to withstand invasion would have been possible. [57] If only they had listened to Bukharin.

An English journalist and historian with the interesting distinction of being an apologist for Stalin, Maoand Hitler. Although he later regretted defending Hitler in the 1930s, he remained a staunch supporter of Stalin until his death in 1982. Among other things, he declared that the Kulaks deserved it, that Stalin's success in making the Soviet Union outweighed any misdeeds, attacked the Polish Government-in-Exile for asking that the Red Cross investigate the Katyn Massacre, claimed that Stalin did not want a puppet government in Poland, and … well…[58]

It was Marshal Stalin who, consciously or unconsciously usurping Woodrow Wilson's role in the previous war, once more placed democracy in the forefront of Allied war aims.

Despite being an unabashed groupie for murderous autocrats, Carr enjoyed considerable acclaim during his lifetime.

U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1936-1938. His 1941 book Mission to Moscow was made into the 1943 film of the same name at the behest of Franklin D. Roosevelt (!) because World War II. Stalin is a kindly grandfatherly sort who only wants world peace, Finland was invaded because Stalin really cared about the Finns and wanted only to protect them from the imminent Nazi invasion, and the Great Purge victims were all guilty as charged of plotting to break up the Soviet Union in a plot instigated by Germany and Japan and led by Trotsky. The only thing that can be said in defense of Davies apologism is that it stemmed from the apparent fact he was really just that naive. To add insult to injury the House Un-American Activities Committee blacklisted the scriptwriter and others involved in that film during the darkest 1950s, even though they had made the film as a patriotic act of World War II propaganda—exactly the sort of thing Stalin would have done.

The Stalin apologist par excellence. A professor of medieval English (read: not History) at Montclair State University, he has written many books about Russian history, some of which bear a resemblance to actual events, and are published by small left-wing presses rather than any sort of academic publisher. Furr has no credentials as a historian.

He also accepts admissions of guilt (and fascist conspiracy) made during the Purge show trials as actual evidence, then asserts some massive fascist conspiracy to undermine the USSR without providing any historical documentation from Nazi Germany that would support his assertion.

Stalinists will cite Furr as academic credibility — look, a professor! — for their views, and try to get you to debate the quality of Furr's scholarship (as if that determines the truth of the historical consensus on Stalin), ignoring that he is a minor fringe academic whose historical work is outside any peer review and, when he does manage to publish it in scholarly venues, does so in some of the lowest ranked and least impactful ones.

Serious devotees of Soviet apologetics are referred to by the derogatory epithet tankies, after the tanks that rolled into Hungary when they dared leave the Soviet Union's loving hugs. This term was coined by other communists who didn't agree with such actions and originated as a term for the Communist Party of Great Britain when they followed the Kremlin line.

The term is routinely used concerning Stalin apologists. Because he was dead by the time the tanks rolled, they will often claim the word properly refers to someone other than them — though approximately nobody goes along with this. You'll also see it being used for Berlin Wall apologists, North Korea apologists, Enver Hoxha apologists, Nicolae Ceausescu apologists, Khmer Rouge apologists, Mao Zedong apologists, and those who cheered the June Fourth Incident Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Other groups get called "tankies" if they take an authoritarian line. There are actually tiny Trotskyist groups that supported military "intervention" in Hungary, e.g. the Marcyites.

Quite a lot of modern-day non-communist Russians — and not just Russian nationalists — are disconcertingly apologetic toward Stalin: he was a strong leader, he won World War II, shit happens along the way, nostalgia, crazification factor. Stalin is most popular among older Russians, who have personal connections to memories of World War II, when 27 million war deaths dwarfed the human toll of Stalin's repression.[62]Older Russians also experienced privations resulting from the end of Soviet communism and its replacement with Yeltsin-era neoliberal looting, tending to view the Soviet era as a time of relative stability and security.

If you can read Russian, the Encyclopedia of Russian Civilisation[63] is an amazing window into the thought processes involved in modern-day Russian quasi-fascism — pro-Eastern-Orthodox, anti-Jewish, anti-Masonic, anti-Communist and anti-democratic. There are no articles about any Soviet leader other than Stalin;[64] even Lenin is mentioned only in passing as a Jewish, anti-Russian (!) and anti-Christian criminal.

Stalin, Iosif Vissarionovich, a Georgian Bolshevik. From late 1930s — a Russian statesman, and the military leader of the Russian people during the Great Patriotic War … The mighty Russian civilization spiritually subjugated itself to the Bolshevik leader and sanctified his activity with positive content … By eliminating the Bolshevik old guard, Stalin did not only struggle for power but also redeemed his guilt in front of the Russian people…

Curiously, given his status among Russian nationalists, Stalin (unlike Lenin) was not Russian, but Georgian.

In a 2010 visit to Poland, Putin provided documentation related to the NKVD's role in the Katyn massacre and paid tribute to its victims, stating that "this crime cannot be justified in any way." Putin also condemned Stalin's claims that the missing officers had "fled to Manchuria" as "cynical lies."[66]

Stalin Society — UK — "The Stalin Society was formed in 1991 to defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist, and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him."

Stalin Society of North America — The Society "serves as an educational and research organization devoted to studying and popularizing the life, work, and legacy of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin."

The U.S. Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist party, says their vision of a future society is based on all the good things about the Soviet Union, with the side note that they want to forgo whatever bad things arose from the Soviet system. In effect, this is a rhetorical strategy to get your mind to think that there were enough really great things about the Soviet system and that the bad things were very few (and possibly just amoral mistakes, even unrelated to mass murder and mass torture).

The U.S. Party for Socialism and Liberation, heavily Marcy-influenced, insists that the bad stuff associated with the Soviet Union is actually just Western propaganda.[70]

↑This is not to deny that the British invoked laissez-fairecapitalism to justify perpetuating the famine and doing nothing to prevent a million Irish deaths from starvation. "Some have classified the famine as an act of genocide (the term was not in use at the time). [John] Kelly calls this charge 'discredited,' but his portraits of some of the more insufferable English statesmen are withering… Charles Edward Trevelyan was a civil servant at the Treasury who oversaw much of the British response. God had 'sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson,' he declared, and it 'must not be too much mitigated.' Some time later he wrote that the famine was a 'direct stroke of an all-wise Providence.' Malthusianism was much in the air in those days, and men like Trevelyan saw the famine as, among other things, a means of transforming Ireland by reducing its population and the number of small farms." New York Times review of: The Graves Are Walking, by John Kelly.

↑Stanislav Kulchytsky, "How many of us perished in Holodomor in 1933", Zerkalo Nedeli, 23–29 November 2002. Available online "in Russian". Archived from the original on 21 July 2006. Retrieved 10 January 2003. and "in Ukrainian". Archived from the original on 5 May 2006. Retrieved 1 February 2003.

↑Kużniar-Plota, Małgorzata (30 November 2004). "Decision to commence investigation into Katyn Massacre". Departmental Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation. Retrieved 4 August 2011.

↑Snyder, Timothy (27 January 2011). "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Was Worse?". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 13 October 2017. "" The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did . . . All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s."

↑Conquest, Robert (2007) The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 40th Anniversary Edition, Oxford University Press, in Preface, p. xvi: "Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors can hardly be lower than some fifteen million."

↑Robert Service (2009) The Penguin History of Modern Russia: From Tsarism to the Twenty-First Century. p. 275: "Nor can it be wholly discounted that the USSR would have been able to achieve about the same volume of output from its factories and mines if the New Economic Policy had been maintained."

↑The video. "I'm gonna answer you, I'm gonna answer you, I'm gonna answer you, I'm gonna answer you. What you said is bullshit! It's wrong, It's a Lie! The history of the Soviet Union is the most falsified! American History is falsified. Alright, I lived in Canada for a number of years, the Canadian school system falsifies Canadian history. But of all the falsifications that go on in the school systems of this world, Soviet history is falsified the most. I have spent many years researching this, and similar questions and I have yet to find one crime! Yet to find one crime! That Stalin commited. I know they all say he killed 20 to 30 to 40 million people, Its bullshit!"